In recent years, some vehicle wheel designs have evolved that do not permit the use of pound-on imbalance correcting weights on the outwardly facing, or “curb” side of the wheel. These wheels are sometimes called “flangeless” or “soft face” wheels. Flangeless or soft face wheels generally require adhesive weights to be applied from the car side of the tire and wheel assembly to the inside diameter of the wheel to correct some portion of the imbalance in the assembly. Currently, an operator selects a specific size weight from a row of bins, removes the protective tape and applies the weight to the wheel. This process is slow and it is easy for the operator to select the wrong weight. In addition, typical currently available adhesive weights are made from pieces of lead with protective coatings to reduce the likelihood of direct worker contact with the lead. These one-piece weights are preformed to a specific wheel radius. Workers sometimes reshape the weights to the radius of a wheel for which the weights were not originally made. Otherwise, optimal adherence of the adhesive weight will not be achieved. These characteristics lead to additional work and rework at imbalance correcting stations for wheel and tire assemblies.
Another currently available system pulls extruded lead, with adhesive already applied, from a coil of extruded lead, forms the extruded lead to a particular radius, and then cuts the amount of extruded lead necessary to achieve a particular amount of imbalance correction. Weights formed using this system leave the ends of the lead weights exposed to contact with workers. This exposed lead is unacceptable to many manufacturers. Also, as noted, this system forms the extruded lead to only one radius. Again, this means that if the weight is to be applied to a wheel having another radius, the worker must reshape the weight to the desired curvature. Additionally, lead is heavy, resulting in the coils having limited capacity. This results in frequent replacement of the somewhat unwieldy coils.